Crean backs plan to pick new airport site in months

The federal Labor Party will adopt a new Sydney airports policy today, committing it to choosing another site for a second airport within six months.

The move, to be endorsed this morning by the ALP caucus, follows last month's decision by the Opposition Leader, Simon Crean, to dump Badgerys Creek as the party's preferred site.

Mr Crean accepted the policy change at a shadow cabinet meeting last night, after a sustained push from Sydney Labor MPs.

The deal creates a sub-committee of shadow cabinet to decide on a preferred site before the next ALP national conference in January.

Three Sydney MPs - Anthony Albanese, Tanya Plibersek and Leo McLeay - had threatened to challenge the Badgerys Creek decision at the conference if another site was not nominated.

Today's policy change is likely to place Wilton and Darkes Forest, near Wollongong, at the top of the list of possible sites.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, said at the weekend there was a strong possibility that Sydney would never need a second airport.

"All the advice coming to the Government is that the current airport can handle the traffic out to about 2020," Mr Howard told Channel Nine.

Mr Howard based his statement on a report produced last month by the Sydney Airports Corporation, which is headed by his former close adviser Max Moore-Wilton. The report forecast a tripling in passenger numbers and a doubling in aircraft movements by 2020.

Ms Plibersek, the member for Sydney, said yesterday that abandoning a second airport would leave people living beneath flight paths exposed to ever-increasing aircraft noise.

She claimed the 11pm curfew on flights and the cap on the number of airport movements would also have to be lifted to deal with the expected increase in flights. "It means the things that have made life bearable for people will have to go."

By committing itself to settling on one preferred site, Labor hopes to limit the inevitable voter backlash to just one electorate.

The shadow cabinet's decision last night came just hours after the Transport Minister, John Anderson, attacked Labor's inability to say where the airport should be built.

Labor's transport spokesman, Martin Ferguson, had said the ALP was considering "a variety of options", which Mr Anderson described as "secret undisclosed locations".

"I want to say to the Labor Party that there are residents in a whole lot of areas who want to know what this variety of locations that the shadow minister for transport is thinking about might be," Mr Anderson told Parliament.

"The residents of Canberra, Newcastle, Goulburn, Warnervale, Somersby, Scheyville, Londonderry, Bringelly, Galston, Duffys Forrest, Richmond and Windsor might like to know. All of them have a right to know if it is their backyard in which Labor's secret proposal is to be located."